Le Notizie del Volterrano: un caso di studio sul metodo di lavoro di Filippo Baldinucci

As the publishing history suggests, the Notizie dei professori del disegno by Filippo Baldinucci had a long and troubled process. Deepening the ideas of Paola Baroc- chi, this essay wants to shed light on some aspects of Baldinucci’s modus operandi, through the analysis of the biography of the painter Baldassarre Franceschini, called il Volterrano. Thanks to recent documentary acquisitions, it is possible to ascertain that a first draft of the text, written on the artist’s memories, was re-elaborated after his death: this explains the coexistence of some extremely accurate and other wrong or non-coherent information. The son of Baldinucci, Francesco Saverio, finished pub- lishing the Notizie thirty years after his father’s death, but decided not to correct their inaccuracies, perhaps as a sign of a conservative choice typical of culture of the late Medici Florence.